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Gary Edwards

The Real Reason for the Iraq War | VICE United Kingdom - 1 views

www.vice.com/...asnt-waged-for-oil-greg-palast

Oil Iraq neocons Saudi Banksters Oilsters

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Like most lefty journalists, I assumed that George Bush and Tony Blair invaded Iraq to buy up its oil fields, cheap and at gun-point, and cart off the oil. We thought we knew the neo-cons true casus belli: Blood for oil. But the truth in the Options for Iraqi Oil Industry was worse than "Blood for Oil". Much, much worse.
  • Within days, our chief of investigations, Ms Badpenny, delivered to my shack in the woods outside New York a 323-page, three-volume programme for Iraq's oil crafted by George Bush's State Department and petroleum insiders meeting secretly in Houston, Texas. I cracked open the pile of paper – and I was blown away.
  • I'd already had in my hands a 101-page document, another State Department secret scheme, first uncovered by Wall Street Journal reporter Neil King, that called for the privatisation, the complete sell-off of every single government-owned asset and industry. And in case anyone missed the point, the sales would include every derrick, pipe and barrel of oil, or, as the document put it, "especially the oil". That plan was created by a gaggle of corporate lobbyists and neo-cons working for the Heritage Foundation. In 2004, the plan's authenticity was confirmed by Washington power player Grover Norquist. (It's hard to erase the ill memory of Grover excitedly waving around his soft little hands as he boasted about turning Iraq into a free-market Disneyland, recreating Chile in Mesopotamia, complete with the Pinochet-style dictatorship necessary to lock up the assets – while behind Norquist, Richard Nixon snarled at me from a gargantuan portrait.) The neo-con idea was to break up and sell off Iraq's oil fields, ramp up production, flood the world oil market – and thereby smash OPEC and with it, the political dominance of Saudi Arabia.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • General Jay Garner also confirmed the plan to grab the oil. Indeed, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld fired Garner, when the General, who had lived in Iraq, complained the neo-con grab would set off a civil war. It did. Nevertheless, Rumsfeld replaced Garner with a new American viceroy, Paul Bremer, a partner in Henry Kissinger's firm, to complete the corporate takeover of Iraq's assets – "especially the oil".
  • But that was not to be. While Bremer oversaw the wall-to-wall transfer of Iraqi industries to foreign corporations, he was stopped cold at the edge of the oil fields. How? I knew there was only one man who could swat away the entire neo-con army: James Baker, former Secretary of State, Bush family consiglieri and most important, counsel to Exxon-Mobil Corporation and the House of Saud.
  • There was no way in hell that Baker's clients, from Exxon to Abdullah, were going to let a gaggle of neo-con freaks smash up Iraq's oil industry, break OPEC production quotas, flood the market with six million bbd of Iraqi oil and thereby knock the price of oil back down to $13 a barrel where it was in 1998.
  • Big Oil could not allow Iraq's oil fields to be privatised and taken from state control. That would make it impossible to keep Iraq within OPEC (an avowed goal of the neo-cons) as the state could no longer limit production in accordance with the cartel's quota system. The US oil industry was using its full political mojo to prevent their being handed ownership of Iraq's oil fields. That's right: The oil companies didn't want to own the oil fields – and they sure as hell didn't want the oil. Just the opposite. They wanted to make sure there would be a limit on the amount of oil that would come out of Iraq. Saddam wasn't trying to stop the flow of oil – he was trying to sell more. The price of oil had been boosted 300 percent by sanctions and an embargo cutting Iraq's sales to two million barrels a day from four. With Saddam gone, the only way to keep the damn oil in the ground was to leave it locked up inside the busted state oil company which would remain under OPEC (i.e. Saudi) quotas. The James Baker Institute quickly and secretly started in on drafting the 323-page plan for the State Department. With authority granted from the top (i.e. Dick Cheney), ex-Shell Oil USA CEO Phil Carroll was rushed to Baghdad in May 2003 to take charge of Iraq's oil. He told Bremer, "There will be no privatisation of oil – END OF STATEMENT." Carroll then passed off control of Iraq's oil to Bob McKee of Halliburton, Cheney's old oil-services company, who implemented the Baker "enhance OPEC" option anchored in state ownership.
  • This week, VICE readers can download, for free, Greg Palast's investigation of the war in Iraq in the BBC film, Bush Family Fortunes, at www.GregPalast.com – as well as the illustrated poster of "The Secret History of War over Oil in Iraq" from Palast's international bestseller, Armed Madhouse, also at www.GregPalast.com
  • Some oil could be released, mainly to China, through limited, but lucrative, "production sharing agreements". And that's how George Bush won the war in Iraq. The invasion was not about "blood for oil", but something far more sinister: blood for no oil. War to keep supply tight and send prices skyward. Oil men, whether James Baker or George Bush or Dick Cheney, are not in the business of producing oil. They are in the business of producing profits. And they've succeeded. Iraq, capable of producing six to 12 million barrels of oil a day, still exports well under its old OPEC quota of three million barrels. The result: As we mark the tenth anniversary of the invasion this month, we also mark the fifth year of crude at $100 a barrel. As George Bush could proudly say to James Baker: Mission Accomplished!
  • Paul Merrell on 29 Mar 13
     
    The Sherman Act forbids conspiracies in restraint of trade and is at its zenith in price-fixing cases. This looks to be the mother of all price-fixing cases, to say the least.   
  • Gary Edwards on 30 Mar 13
     
    Wow, Marbux has it right.  This report from the legendary Greg Palast of the BBC News Network is a stunning reversal of what everyone believed to be the truth.  To wit, the militarist and global strategist - resource control hungry neocon contingent of the Repubican party was always thought to be behind the Iraqi war.  For control of cheap, plentiful oil and, the protection / destruction of Israel's enemies.   Funny, but it turns out America was fighting for higher oil prices and limited supplies.  Just as in the first Gulf War, Americans were fighting to protect Saudi and big oil profits. excerpt: Big Oil could not allow Iraq's oil fields to be privatised and taken from state control. That would make it impossible to keep Iraq within OPEC (an avowed goal of the neo-cons) as the state could no longer limit production in accordance with the cartel's quota system. The US oil industry was using its full political mojo to prevent their being handed ownership of Iraq's oil fields. That's right: The oil companies didn't want to own the oil fields - and they sure as hell didn't want the oil. Just the opposite. They wanted to make sure there would be a limit on the amount of oil that would come out of Iraq. Saddam wasn't trying to stop the flow of oil - he was trying to sell more. The price of oil had been boosted 300 percent by sanctions and an embargo cutting Iraq's sales to two million barrels a day from four. With Saddam gone, the only way to keep the damn oil in the ground was to leave it locked up inside the busted state oil company which would remain under OPEC (i.e. Saudi) quotas. The James Baker Institute quickly and secretly started in on drafting the 323-page plan for the State Department. With authority granted from the top (i.e. Dick Cheney), ex-Shell Oil USA CEO Phil Carroll was rushed to Baghdad in May 2003 to take charge of Iraq's oil. He told Bremer, "There will be no privatisation of oil - END OF STATEMENT." Carroll then passed off control
Gary Edwards

Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House | Zero Hedge - 0 views

www.zerohedge.com/...14-forecast-burning-down-house

Banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Jan 14
     
    Incredible must read analysis. Take away: the world is going to go "medevil". It's the only way out of this mess. Since the zero hedge layout is so bad, i'm going to post as much of the article as Diigo will allow: Jim Kunstler's 2014 Forecast - Burning Down The House Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/06/2014 19:36 -0500 Submitted by James H. Kunstler of Kunstler.com , Many of us in the Long Emergency crowd and like-minded brother-and-sisterhoods remain perplexed by the amazing stasis in our national life, despite the gathering tsunami of forces arrayed to rock our economy, our culture, and our politics. Nothing has yielded to these forces already in motion, so far. Nothing changes, nothing gives, yet. It's like being buried alive in Jell-O. It's embarrassing to appear so out-of-tune with the consensus, but we persevere like good soldiers in a just war. Paper and digital markets levitate, central banks pull out all the stops of their magical reality-tweaking machine to manipulate everything, accounting fraud pervades public and private enterprise, everything is mis-priced, all official statistics are lies of one kind or another, the regulating authorities sit on their hands, lost in raptures of online pornography (or dreams of future employment at Goldman Sachs), the news media sprinkles wishful-thinking propaganda about a mythical "recovery" and the "shale gas miracle" on a credulous public desperate to believe, the routine swindles of medicine get more cruel and blatant each month, a tiny cohort of financial vampire squids suck in all the nominal wealth of society, and everybody else is left whirling down the drain of posterity in a vortex of diminishing returns and scuttled expectations. Life in the USA is like living in a broken-down, cob-jobbed, vermin-infested house that needs to be gutted, disinfected, and rebuilt - with the hope that it might come out of the restoration process retaining the better qualities of our heritage.
Paul Merrell

US's Saudi Oil Deal from Win-Win to Mega-Loose | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...eal-from-win-win-to-mega-loose

must-read banksters big oil Saudis Russia shale-oil U.S.-foreign-policy

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • Who would’ve thought it would come to this? Certainly not the Obama Administration, and their brilliant geo-political think-tank neo-conservative strategists. John Kerry’s brilliant “win-win” proposal of last September during his September 11 Jeddah meeting with ailing Saudi King Abdullah was simple: Do a rerun of the highly successful State Department-Saudi deal in 1986 when Washington persuaded the Saudis to flood the world market at a time of over-supply in order to collapse oil prices worldwide, a kind of “oil shock in reverse.” In 1986 was successful in helping to break the back of a faltering Soviet Union highly dependent on dollar oil export revenues for maintaining its grip on power. So, though it was not made public, Kerry and Abdullah agreed on September 11, 2014 that the Saudis would use their oil muscle to bring Putin’s Russia to their knees today.
  • It seemed brilliant at the time no doubt. On the following day, 12 September 2014, the US Treasury’s aptly-named Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, headed by Treasury Under-Secretary David S. Cohen, announced new sanctions against Russia’s energy giants Gazprom, Gazprom Neft, Lukoil, Surgutneftgas and Rosneft. It forbid US oil companies to participate with the Russian companies in joint ventures for oil or gas offshore or in the Arctic. Then, just as the ruble was rapidly falling and Russian major corporations were scrambling for dollars for their year-end settlements, a collapse of world oil prices would end Putin’s reign. That was clearly the thinking of the hollowed-out souls who pass for statesmen in Washington today. Victoria Nuland was jubilant, praising the precision new financial warfare weapon at David Cohen’s Treasury financial terrorism unit. In July, 2014 West Texas Intermediate, the benchmark price for US domestic oil pricing, traded at $101 a barrel. The shale oil bonanza was booming, making the US into a major oil player for the first time since the 1970’s. When WTI hit $46 at the beginning of January this year, suddenly things looked different. Washington realized they had shot themselves in the foot.
  • They realized that the over-indebted US shale oil industry was about to collapse under the falling oil price. Behind the scenes Washington and Wall Street colluded to artificially stabilize what then was an impending chain-reaction bankruptcy collapse in the US shale oil industry. As a result oil prices began a slow rise, hitting $53 in February. The Wall Street and Washington propaganda mills began talking about the end of falling oil prices. By May prices had crept up to $62 and almost everyone was convinced oil recovery was in process. How wrong they were.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Since that September 11 Kerry-Abdullah meeting (curious date to pick, given the climate of suspicion that the Bush family is covering up involvement of the Saudis in or around the events of September 11, 2001), the Saudis have a new ageing King, Absolute Monarch and Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman, replacing the since deceased old ageing King, Abdullah. However, the Oil Minister remains unchanged—79-year-old Ali al-Naimi. It was al-Naimi who reportedly saw the golden opportunity in the Kerry proposal to use the chance to at the same time kill off the growing market challenge from the rising output of the unconventional USA shale oil industry. Al-Naimi has said repeatedly that he is determined to eliminate the US shale oil “disturbance” to Saudi domination of world oil markets. Not only are the Saudis unhappy with the US shale oil intrusion on their oily Kingdom. They are more than upset with the recent deal the Obama Administration made with Iran that will likely lead in several months to lifting Iran economic sanctions. In fact the Saudis are beside themselves with rage against Washington, so much so that they have openly admitted an alliance with arch foe, Israel, to combat what they see as the Iran growing dominance in the region—in Syria, in Lebanon, in Iraq.
  • This has all added up to an iron Saudi determination, aided by close Gulf Arab allies, to further crash oil prices until the expected wave of shale oil company bankruptcies—that was halted in January by Washington and Wall Street manipulations—finishes off the US shale oil competition. That day may come soon, but with unintended consequences for the entire global financial system at a time such consequences can ill be afforded. According to a recent report by Wall Street bank, Morgan Stanley, a major player in crude oil markets, OPEC oil producers have been aggressively increasing oil supply on the already glutted world market with no hint of a letup. In its report Morgan Stanley noted with visible alarm, “OPEC has added 1.5 million barrels/day to global supply in the last four months alone…the oil market is currently 800,000 barrels/day oversupplied. This suggests that the current oversupply in the oil market is fully due to OPEC’s production increase since February alone.” The Wall Street bank report adds the disconcerting note, “We anticipated that OPEC would not cut, but we didn’t foresee such a sharp increase.” In short, Washington has completely lost its strategic leverage over Saudi Arabia, a Kingdom that had been considered a Washington vassal ever since FDR’s deal to bring US oil majors in on an exclusive basis in 1945.
  • That breakdown in US-Saudi communication adds a new dimension to the recent June 18 high-level visit to St. Petersburg by Muhammad bin Salman, the Saudi Deputy Crown Prince and Defense Minister and son of King Salman, to meet President Vladimir Putin. The meeting was carefully prepared by both sides as the two discussed up to $10 billion of trade deals including Russian construction of peaceful nuclear power reactors in the Kingdom and supplying of advanced Russian military equipment and Saudi investment in Russia in agriculture, medicine, logistics, retail and real estate. Saudi Arabia today is the world’s largest oil producer and Russia a close second. A Saudi-Russian alliance on whatever level was hardly in the strategy book of the Washington State Department planners.…Oh shit! Now that OPEC oil glut the Saudis have created has cracked the shaky US effort to push oil prices back up. The price fall is being further fueled by fears that the Iran deal will add even more to the glut, and that the world’s second largest oil importer, China, may cut back imports or at least not increase them as their economy slows down. The oil market time bomb detonated in the last week of June. The US price of WTI oil went from $60 a barrel then, a level at which at least many shale oil producers can stay afloat a bit longer, to $49 on July 29, a drop of more than 18% in four weeks, tendency down. Morgan Stanley sounded loud alarm bells, stating that if the trend of recent weeks continues, “this downturn would be more severe than that in 1986. As there was no sharp downturn in the 15 years before that, the current downturn could be the worst of the last 45+ years. If this were to be the case, there would be nothing in our experience that would be a guide to the next phases of this cycle…In fact, there may be nothing in analyzable history.”
  • October is the next key point for bank decisions to roll-over US shale company loans or to keep extending credit on the (until now) hope that prices will slowly recover. If as strongly hinted, the Federal Reserve hikes US interest rates in September for the first time in the eight years since the global financial crisis erupted in the US real estate market in 2007, the highly-indebted US shale oil producers face disaster of a new scale. Until the past few weeks the volume of US shale oil production has remained at the maximum as shale producers desperately try to maximize cash flow, ironically, laying the seeds of the oil glut globally that will be their demise. The reason US shale oil companies have been able to continue in business since last November and not declare bankruptcy is the ongoing Federal Reserve zero interest rate policy that leads banks and other investors to look for higher interest rates in the so-called “High Yield” bond market. Back in the 1980’s when they were first created by Michael Millken and his fraudsters at Drexel Burnham Lambert, Wall Street appropriately called them “junk bonds” because when times got bad, like now for Shale companies, they turned into junk. A recent UBS bank report states, “the overall High-Yield market has doubled in size; sectors that witnessed more buoyant issuance in recent years, like energy and metals mining, have seen debt outstanding triple or quadruple.”
  • Assuming that the most recent downturn in WTI oil prices continues week after week into October, there well could be a panic run to sell billions of dollars of those High-Yield, high-risk junk bonds. As one investment analyst notes, “when the retail crowd finally does head for the exits en masse, fund managers will be forced to come face to face with illiquid secondary corporate credit markets where a lack of market depth…has the potential to spark a fire sale.” The problem is that this time, unlike in 2008, the Federal Reserve has no room to act. Interest rates are already near zero and the Fed has bought trillions of dollars of bank bad debt to prevent a chain-reaction US bank panic. One option that is not being discussed at all in Washington would be for Congress to repeal the disastrous 1913 Federal Reserve Act that gave control of our nation’s money to a gang of private bankers, and to create a public National Bank, owned completely by the United States Government, that could issue credit and sell Federal debt without the intermediaries of corrupt Wall Street bankers as the Constitution intended. At the same time they could completely nationalize the six or seven “Too Big To Fail” banks behind the entire financial mess that is destroying the foundations of the United States and by extension of the role of the dollar as world reserve currency, of most of the world.
  • Paul Merrell on 09 Aug 15
     
    I give a lot of credibility to this article's author when it comes to matters involving the oil market. Remember when reading that the only thing propping up the U.S. dollar is the Saudi (later extended to all OPEC nations) insistence that they be paid for their oil and natural gas in U.S. dollars, which creates artificial demand for the dollar globally. If the Gulf Coast States begin accepting payment in rubles or yuan, it is curtains for the U.S. dollar in global markets.  
Paul Merrell

Are Trump Sanctions Backfiring? Iran's Oil Revenues Are Soaring - 0 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...249185

war & peace economic-warfare Iran U.S.-sanctions oil-prices

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Sep 18 - No Cached
  • Despite the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign targeting the Iranian economy, Iran’s crude oil and oil product revenues jumped a surprising 60 percent from March 21 to July 23. In addition, figures provided by Iran’s Central Bank show that Iran’s revenues from oil sales soared by 84.2 percent over that same period, setting a new record. The increased revenues seem to have resulted from a jump in oil prices this year as well as Iran’s high oil export volume during part of that period. Notably, the increased revenues were reported despite the United States’ announcement in May that it would sanction those purchasing Iranian oil starting in early November, with the ultimate goal of reducing Iranian oil sales to zero in order to place pressure on the Iranian government
  • Further dashing U.S. hopes of crushing Iranian oil exports have been recent announcements from Iran’s top two customers, China and India, that they would continue to import Iranian crude despite the looming threat of U.S. sanctions. India, along with some other countries, has sought “waivers” from Washington that would allow them to continue to import Iranian oil and avoid retaliation from the U.S. for a certain period of time. In addition, the European Union, which had previously joined the U.S. in targeting Iranian oil exports in 2012, has shown its unwillingness to follow Washington’s lead this time around, openly vowing to rebel against the U.S. sanctions regimen and increasing the likelihood that Europe will continue to buy some Iranian oil despite U.S. threats.
  • Another indication that efforts to curb Iranian oil exports are backfiring for the Trump administration is the jump in oil prices that has resulted from concerns about the U.S. sanctions on Iran’s oil exports. The increase in oil prices is likely to be felt domestically in the U.S., the world’s largest consumer of oil, potentially posing a political risk to Trump and his fellow Republicans ahead of the November 6 midterm elections.  In addition, further oil price increases could trigger a slowdown in domestic or global economic growth, which could further complicate the U.S.’ Iran policy and Trump’s domestic political situation.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • While the Trump administration may have assumed that U.S. oil producers – and the U.S. economy in general — would benefit from the elimination of Iranian oil exports, the growing rejection of the impending U.S. sanctions by other countries shows that these nations are unwilling to pay for more expensive American oil or even Saudi oil, preferring less expensive Iranian oil despite potential future consequences. Furthermore, efforts to increase U.S. crude production have fallen short of government expectations, further complicating the U.S.’ efforts to offset an increase in oil prices resulting from Iranian oil sanctions.
Gary Edwards

Russia Breaking Wall St Oil Price Monopoly | New Eastern Outlook - 0 views

journal-neo.org/...ing-wall-st-oil-price-monopoly

Banksters petro-dollars

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • In the period up until the end of the 1980’s world oil prices were determined largely by real daily supply and demand. It was the province of oil buyers and oil sellers. Then Goldman Sachs decided to buy the small Wall Street commodity brokerage, J. Aron in the 1980’s. They had their eye set on transforming how oil is traded in world markets. It was the advent of “paper oil,” oil traded in futures, contracts independent of delivery of physical crude, easier for the large banks to manipulate based on rumors and derivative market skullduggery, as a handful of Wall Street banks dominated oil futures trades and knew just who held what positions, a convenient insider role that is rarely mentioned inn polite company. It was the beginning of transforming oil trading into a casino where Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP MorganChase and a few other giant Wall Street banks ran the crap tables.First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2016/01/09/russia-breaking-wall-st-oil-price-monopoly/
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Jan 16
     
    "Russia has just taken significant steps that will break the present Wall Street oil price monopoly, at least for a huge part of the world oil market. The move is part of a longer-term strategy of decoupling Russia's economy and especially its very significant export of oil, from the US dollar, today the Achilles Heel of the Russian economy. Later in November the Russian Energy Ministry has announced that it will begin test-trading of a new Russian oil benchmark. While this might sound like small beer to many, it's huge. If successful, and there is no reason why it won't be, the Russian crude oil benchmark futures contract traded on Russian exchanges, will price oil in rubles and no longer in US dollars. It is part of a de-dollarization move that Russia, China and a growing number of other countries have quietly begun. The setting of an oil benchmark price is at the heart of the method used by major Wall Street banks to control world oil prices. Oil is the world's largest commodity in dollar terms. Today, the price of Russian crude oil is referenced to what is called the Brent price. The problem is that the Brent field, along with other major North Sea oil fields is in major decline, meaning that Wall Street can use a vanishing benchmark to leverage control over vastly larger oil volumes. The other problem is that the Brent contract is controlled essentially by Wall Street and the derivatives manipulations of banks like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JP MorganChase and Citibank. First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2016/01/09/russia-breaking-wall-st-oil-price-monopoly/"
Paul Merrell

The Secret Stupid Saudi-US Deal on Syria - 0 views

www.boilingfrogspost.com/...-stupid-saudi-us-deal-on-syria

war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy war by proxy Ukraine Syria pipelinestan-war

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • The details are emerging of a new secret and quite stupid Saudi-US deal on Syria and the so-called IS. It involves oil and gas control of the entire region and the weakening of Russia and Iran by Saudi Arabian flooding the world market with cheap oil. Details were concluded in the September meeting by US Secretary of State John Kerry and the Saudi King. The unintended consequence will be to push Russia even faster to turn east to China and Eurasia. One of the weirdest anomalies of the recent NATO bombing campaign, allegedly against the ISIS or IS or ISIL or Daash, depending on your preference, is the fact that with major war raging in the world’s richest oil region, the price of crude oil has been dropping, dramatically so. Since June when ISIS suddenly captured the oil-rich region of Iraq around Mosul and Kirkuk, the benchmark Brent price of crude oil dropped some 20% from $112 to about $88. World daily demand for oil has not dropped by 20% however. China oil demand has not fallen 20% nor has US domestic shale oil stock risen by 21%.
  • What has happened is that the long-time US ally inside OPEC, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, has been flooding the market with deep discounted oil, triggering a price war within OPEC, with Iran following suit and panic selling short in oil futures markets. The Saudis are targeting sales to Asia for the discounts and in particular, its major Asian customer, China where it is reportedly offering its crude for a mere $50 to $60 a barrel rather than the earlier price of around $100. [1] That Saudi financial discounting operation in turn is by all appearance being coordinated with a US Treasury financial warfare operation, via its Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, in cooperation with a handful of inside players on Wall Street who control oil derivatives trading. The result is a market panic that is gaining momentum daily. China is quite happy to buy the cheap oil, but her close allies, Russia and Iran, are being hit severely.
  • The US-Saudi oil price manipulation is aimed at destabilizing several strong opponents of US globalist policies. Targets include Iran and Syria, both allies of Russia in opposing a US sole Superpower. The principal target, however, is Putin’s Russia, the single greatest threat today to that Superpower hegemony. The strategy is similar to what the US did with Saudi Arabia in 1986 when they flooded the world with Saudi oil, collapsing the price to below $10 a barrel and destroying the economy of then-Soviet ally, Saddam Hussein in Iraq and, ultimately, of the Soviet economy, paving the way for the fall of the Soviet Union. Today, the hope is that a collapse of Russian oil revenues, combined with select pin-prick sanctions designed by the US Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence will dramatically weaken Putin’s enormous domestic support and create conditions for his ultimate overthrow. It is doomed to fail for many reasons, not the least, because Putin’s Russia has taken major strategic steps together with China and other nations to lessen its dependence on the West. In fact the oil weapon is accelerating recent Russian moves to focus its economic power on national interests and lessen dependence on the Dollar system. If the dollar ceases being the currency of world trade, especially oil trade, the US Treasury faces financial catastrophe. For this reason, I call the Kerry-Abdullah oil war a very stupid tactic.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • According to Rashid Abanmy, President of the Riyadh-based Saudi Arabia Oil Policies and Strategic Expectations Center, the dramatic price collapse is being deliberately caused by the Saudis, OPEC’s largest producer. The public reason claimed is to gain new markets in a global market of weakening oil demand. The real reason, according to Abanmy, is to put pressure on Iran on her nuclear program, and on Russia to end her support for Bashar al-Assad in Syria.[2] When combined with the financial losses of Russian state natural gas sales to Ukraine and prospects of a US-instigated cutoff of the transit of Russian gas to the huge EU market this winter as EU stockpiles become low, the pressure on oil prices hits Moscow doubly. More than 50% of Russian state revenue comes from its export sales of oil and gas.
  • The details are emerging of a new secret and quite stupid Saudi-US deal on Syria and the so-called IS. It involves oil and gas control of the entire region and the weakening of Russia and Iran by Saudi Arabian flooding the world market with cheap oil. Details were concluded in the September meeting by US Secretary of State John Kerry and the Saudi King. The unintended consequence will be to push Russia even faster to turn east to China and Eurasia. One of the weirdest anomalies of the recent NATO bombing campaign, allegedly against the ISIS or IS or ISIL or Daash, depending on your preference, is the fact that with major war raging in the world’s richest oil region, the price of crude oil has been dropping, dramatically so. Since June when ISIS suddenly captured the oil-rich region of Iraq around Mosul and Kirkuk, the benchmark Brent price of crude oil dropped some 20% from $112 to about $88. World daily demand for oil has not dropped by 20% however. China oil demand has not fallen 20% nor has US domestic shale oil stock risen by 21%.
  • Paul Merrell on 14 Dec 14
     
    One I missed from late October.
Paul Merrell

Erdogan Says Will Resign If Oil Purchases From ISIS Proven After Putin Says Has "More P... - 0 views

www.zerohedge.com/...rkey-after-erdogan-slams-claim

war & peace Syria oil-smuggling ISIL Erdogan Turkey Russia

shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • “I’ve shown photos taken from space and from aircraft which clearly demonstrate the scale of the illegal trade in oil and petroleum products,” Vladimir Putin told reporters earlier this month on the sidelines of the G-20 summit in Antalya. Putin was of course referencing Islamic State’s illicit and highly lucrative oil trade, the ins and outs of which we’ve documented extensively over the past two weeks: The Most Important Question About ISIS That Nobody Is Asking Meet The Man Who Funds ISIS: Bilal Erdogan, The Son Of Turkey's President How Turkey Exports ISIS Oil To The World: The Scientific Evidence ISIS Oil Trade Full Frontal: "Raqqa's Rockefellers", Bilal Erdogan, KRG Crude, And The Israel Connection Turkey’s move to shoot down a Russian Su-24 warplane near the Syrian border afforded the Russian President all the motivation and PR cover he needed to expose Ankara’s alleged role in the trafficking of illegal crude from Iraq and Syria and in the aftermath of last Tuesday’s “incident,” Putin lambasted Erdogan. “Oil from Islamic State is being shipped to Turkey,” Putin said while in Jordan for a meeting with King Abdullah. In case that wasn’t clear enough, Putin added this: “Islamic State gets cash by selling oil to Turkey.”
  • To be sure, it’s impossible to track the path ISIS oil takes from extraction to market with any degree of precision. That said, it seems that Islamic State takes advantage of the same network of smugglers, traders, and shipping companies that the KRG uses to transport Kurdish crude from Kurdistan to the Turkish port of Ceyhan. From there, the oil makes its way to Israel and other markets (depending on which story you believe) and if anyone needs to be thrown off the trail along the way, there’s a ship-to-ship transfer trick that can be executed off the coast of Malta. The maneuver allegedly makes the cargoes more difficult to track.  Some believe Erdogan’s son Bilal - who owns a marine transport company called BMZ Group - is heavily involved in the trafficking of Kurdish and ISIS crude. Most of the ships BMZ owns are Malta-flagged.  In light of the above, some have speculated that Turkey shot down the Su-24 in retaliation for Russia’s bombing campaign that recently has destroyed over 1,000 ISIS oil trucks. Here’s what Syrian Information Minister Omran al-Zoub said on Friday:
  • “All of the oil was delivered to a company that belongs to the son of Recep [Tayyip] Erdogan. This is why Turkey became anxious when Russia began delivering airstrikes against the IS infrastructure and destroyed more than 500 trucks with oil already. This really got on Erdogan and his company’s nerves. They’re importing not only oil, but wheat and historic artefacts as well." Al-Zoub isn’t alone in his suspicions. In an interview with RT, Iraqi MP and former national security adviser, Mowaffak al Rubaie - who personally led Saddam to the gallows - said ISIS is selling around $100 million of stolen crude each month in Turkey. Here are some excerpts:  “In the last eight months ISIS has managed to sell ... $800 million dollars worth of oil on the black market of Turkey. This is Iraqi oil and Syrian oil, carried by trucks from Iraq, from Syria through the borders to Turkey and sold ...[at] less than 50 percent of the international oil price."   "Now this either get consumed inside, the crude is refined on Turkish territory by the Turkish refineries, and sold in the Turkish market. Or it goes to Jihan and then in the pipelines from Jihan to the Mediterranean and sold to the international market.”
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  • Hilariously, the man who just finished starting a civil war just so he could regain a few lost seats in Parliament and who would just as soon throw you in jail as look at you if he thinks you might be a threat to his government, now says he will resign if Putin (or anyone else) can present "proof": “We are not that dishonest as to buy oil from terrorists. If it is proven that we have, in fact, done so, I will leave office. If there is any evidence, let them present it, we’ll consider [it]."  Hold your breath on that. And so, the Turkey connection has been exposed and in dramatic fashion. Unfortunately for Ankara, Erdogan can't arrest Vladimir Putin like he can award winning journalists and honest police officers who, like Moscow, want to see the flow of money and weapons to Sunni militants in Syria cut off.  The real question is how NATO will react now that Turkey is quickly becoming a liability. Furthermore, you can be sure that the US, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar (who are all heavily invested in the Sunni extremist cause in Syria), are getting nervous. No one wants to see this blown wide open as that would mean the Western public getting wise to the fact that it is indeed anti-ISIS coalition governments that are funding and arming not only ISIS, but also al-Nusra and every other rebel group fighting to wrest control of the country from Assad. Worse, if it gets out that the reason the US has refrained from bombing ISIS oil trucks until now is due to the fact that Ankara and Washington had an understanding when it comes to the flow of illicit crude to Cehyan, the American public may just insist on indicting "some folks." 
  • On Monday, Putin was back at it, saying that Russia has obtained new information that further implicates Turkey in the Islamic State oil trade. “At the moment we have received additional information confirming that that oil from the deposits controlled by Islamic State militants enters Turkish territory on industrial scale," Putin said on the sidelines of the climate change summit in Paris. "We have traced some located on the territory of the Turkish Republic and living in regions guarded by special security services and police that have used the visa-free regime to return to our territory, where we continue to fight them." "We have every reason to believe that the decision to down our plane was guided by a desire to ensure security of this oil’s delivery routes to ports where they are shipped in tankers," he added, taking it up another notch still.  As for Erdogan, well, he "can't accept" the accusations which he calls "not moral": ERDOGAN: TURKEY CAN'T ACCEPT RUSSIA CLAIMS THAT IT BUYS IS OIL LATEST - Erdo?an: Russia’s claim that Turkey bought oil from Daesh is not ‘moral’, such claims have to be proved pic.twitter.com/PZka8MwzpL — DAILY SABAH (@DailySabah) November 30, 2015
  • lars generated by selling Iraqi and Syrian oil on the Turkish black market  is like the oxygen supply to ISIS and it’s operation,” he added. “Once you cut the oxygen then ISIS will suffocate.”   "There isn't a shadow of a doubt that the Turkish government knows about the oil smuggling operations. The merchants, the businessmen [are buying oil] in the black market in Turkey under the noses – under the auspices if you like – of the Turkish intelligence agency and the Turkish security apparatus."   “There are security officers who are sympathizing with ISIS in Turkey. They are allowing them to go from Istanbul to the borders and infiltrate ... Syria and Iraq.”   “There is no terrorist organization which can stand alone, without a neighboring country helping it – in this case Turkey.”
  • Remember, when it comes to criminal conspiracies, the guy who gets caught first usually ends up getting cut loose. It will be interesing to see if Erdogan starts to get the cold shoulder from Ankara's "allies" going forward.
Paul Merrell

ClubOrlov: Whiplash! - 0 views

cluborlov.blogspot.com/...whiplash.html

oil-market forecast pipelinestan-wars geopolitics

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Over the course of 2014 the prices the world pays for crude oil have tumbled from over $125 per barrel to around $45 per barrel now, and could easily drop further before heading much higher before collapsing again before spiking again. You get the idea. In the end, the wild whipsawing of the oil market, and the even wilder whipsawing of financial markets, currencies and the rolling bankruptcies of energy companies, then the entities that financed them, then national defaults of the countries that backed these entities, will in due course cause industrial economies to collapse. And without a functioning industrial economy crude oil would be reclassified as toxic waste. But that is still two or three decades off in the future.
  • An additional problem is the very high depletion rate of “fracked” shale oil wells in the US. Currently, the shale oil producers are pumping flat out and setting new production records, but the drilling rate is collapsing fast. Shale oil wells deplete very fast: flow rates go down by half in just a few months, and are negligible after a couple of years. Production can only be maintained through relentless drilling, and that relentless drilling has now stopped. Thus, we have just a few months of glut left. After that, the whole shale oil revolution, which some bobbleheads thought would refashion the US into a new Saudi Arabia, will be over. It won't help that most of the shale oil producers, who speculated wildly on drilling leases, will be going bankrupt, along with exploration and production companies and oil field service companies. The entire economy that popped up in recent years around the shale oil patch in the US, which was responsible for most of the growth in high-paying jobs, will collapse, causing the unemployment rate to spike.
  • The game they are playing is basically a game of chicken. If everybody pumps all the oil they can regardless of the price, then at some point one of two things will happen: shale oil production will collapse, or other producers will run out of money, and their production will collapse. The question is, Which one of these will happen first? The US is betting that the low oil prices will destroy the governments of the three major oil producers that are not under their political and/or military control. These are Venezuela, Iran and, of course, Russia. These are long shots, but, having no other cards to play, the US is desperate. Is Venezuela enough of a prize? Previous attempts at regime change in Venezuela failed; why would this one succeed? Iran has learned to survive in spite of western sanctions, and maintains trade links with China, Russia and quite a few other countries to work around them. In the case of Russia, it is as yet unclear what fruit, if any, western policies against it will bear. For example, if Greece decides to opt out of the European Union in order to get around Russia's retaliatory sanctions against the EU, then it will become entirely unclear who has actually sanctioned whom.
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  • The US is making a desperate attempt to knock over a petro-state or two or three before its shale oil runs out, with the Canadians, their tar sands now unprofitable, hitching a ride on its coat-tails, because if this attempt doesn't work, then it's lights out for the empire. But none of their recent gambits have worked. This is the winter of imperial discontent, and the empire is has been reduced to pulling pathetic little stunts that would be quite funny if they weren't also sinister and sad.
  • But a bunch of deluded people muttering to themselves in a dark corner, while the rest of the world points at them and laughs, does not an empire make. With this level of performance, I would venture to guess that nothing the empire tries from here on will work to its satisfaction.
  • Because it will recover. The fix for low oil prices is... low oil prices. Past some point high-priced producers will naturally stop producing, the excess inventory will get burned up, and the price will recover. Not only will it recover, but it will probably spike, because a country littered with the corpses of bankrupt oil companies is not one that is likely to jump right back into producing lots of oil while, on the other hand, beyond a few uses of fossil fuels that are discretionary, demand is quite inelastic. And an oil price spike will cause another round of demand destruction, because the consumers, devastated by the bankruptcies and the job losses from the collapse of the oil patch, will soon be bankrupted by the higher price. And that will cause the price of oil to collapse again. And so on until the last industrialist dies. His cause of death will be listed as “whiplash”: the “shaken industrialist syndrome,” if you will. Oil prices too high/low in rapid alternation will have caused his neck to snap.
  • Paul Merrell on 21 Jan 15
     
    Dmitry Orlov with a humorous yet inscisient take on the state and future of the oil market. Spoiler: He sees signs of desperation amongst the leaders of the American Empire, reduced to no viable options. 
  • Paul Merrell on 21 Jan 15
     
    "inscisient"? Make that "incisive." Follow reading Orlov's piece by reading Mike Whitney's latest at http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/20/are-plunging-petrodollar-revenues-behind-the-feds-projected-rate-hikes/ A lot of confirmation of what Orlov said in Whitney's article, citing hard numbers. Mass layoffs in the U.S. and Canadian oil industry; the petrodolar has stopped providing liquidity for the dollar; and the Fed plans to raise interest rates to force an influx of dollars from developing nations, in order to replace the petrodollar liquidity crisis. Whitney makes a strong case that it's a plot by the big banksters to steal another huge pile of cash at the expense of a huge number of jobs in the U.S. Both Orlov and Whitney say that it's going to be a very rough ride for the 99 per cent and for the population of developing nations. Indeed, Whitney's numbers say we are already over the precipice on jobs and well into free-fall.
  • Paul Merrell on 21 Jan 15
     
    But last night, Obama had the gall to claim that all is just peachy-k een on the jobs front. As he helps the banksters offshore another huge number of U.S. jobs.
Paul Merrell

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya - Turkish-ISIL Oil Trade: Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Russia All Acc... - 0 views

www.strategic-culture.org/...mosul-protect-oil-trade-i.html

war & peace banksters ISIL Kurdistan Syria Iraq oil-smuggling must-read

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Because of the Turkish government’s role in the multi-spectrum US-led war against the Syrian Arab Republic, a war of words has ignited between Ankara and Moscow. Russia, however, is not alone in accusing Turkey of being involved in the theft of Syrian and Iraqi oil. Turkish opposition politicians, Turkish media, and various governments in the Middle East have also raised their voices about the role of Turkish officials in smuggling from the conflict zones in Syria and Iraq.
  • Paul Merrell on 05 Jan 16
     
    This is the first of a must-read, in-depth, four-part series of articles on the ISIL/Kurd oil smuggling from Syria and Iraq via Turkey to world markets. The series details the involvement of western banksters (including Goldman Sachs) in setting up the capitalization of a new company created to plunder the natural resources of Iraq, Syria, and other nations targeted by the U.S. for destabilization. The second article, Turkish-ISIL Oil Trade: Did the Turkish Military Enter Mosul to Protect its Oil Trade? (II), is here. http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2015/12/18/turkish-isil-oil-trade-did-turkish-military-enter-mosul-protect-oil-trade-ii.html The third article, Turkish-ISIL Oil Trade: The Roles of the Kurdistan Regional Government, Britain, and Israel (III), is here. http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2015/12/19/turkish-isil-oil-trade-did-turkish-military-enter-mosul-protect-oil-trade-iii.html The final article, Turkish-ISIL Oil Trade: US and NATO Culpability (IV), is here. http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2015/12/20/turkish-isil-oil-trade-us-and-nato-culpability-iv.html   
Paul Merrell

Crude price drop triggers major layoffs in US oil industry - RT USA - 0 views

www.rt.com/...217959-us-oil-industry-prices

war & peace economic warfare U.S.-foreign-policy blowback oil-buttle

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • Thousands of recently highly paid workers have been laid off after the oil price plummeted 50 percent in 2014. At least four American oil-producing states are already facing budget problems due to decreasing oil revenues. The price plunge has affected petroleum production in all oil-extracting countries, including the US.
  • For Texas, which has a far larger and more diversified economy than Louisiana, the oil price downturn is no good either. In just October and November Texas lost 2,300 oil and gas jobs, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics reported last week. Through the last half a year the state has been losing $83 million in potential revenue every day, the Greater Houston Partnership recently reported. They blamed this on crashing price of its West Texas Intermediate crude oil, which has depreciated to $54.73 per barrel this week, from more than $100 six months ago.
  • This doesn’t apply to the state of Alaska. According to the NYT, approximately 90 percent of state’s budget is formed from oil revenues. Alaska’s government is considering a 50 percent capital-spending cut for bridges and roads in the face of the oil price drop, with Moody’s, the credit rating service, lowering Alaska’s credit outlook from stable to negative. The state of Louisiana’s 2015-16 budget is going to be $1.4 billion short, with 162 state government positions already eliminated and more to be discontinued starting from January. Contracts and projects are being either reduced or frozen in state agencies. According to the state’s chief economist Greg Albrecht, for every $1 fall in price of an annual average barrel of oil, Louisiana loses $12 million.
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  • Now according to Tom Runiewicz, a US industry economist at IHS Global Insight, if oil stays around $56 a barrel till the middle of the next year, companies providing services to oil and gas industry could lose 40,000 jobs by the end of 2015, while oil and gas equipment manufacturers could slash up to 6,000 jobs.
  • The situation in other oil-extracting states could be even worse. In a study published last year, the Council on Foreign Relations warned the largest job losses caused by sharp decline in oil prices are going to take place in North Dakota, Oklahoma and Wyoming, where the number of drilling rigs is decreasing.
  • Currently cheap fuel is still believed to be providing an overall boost to the US economy, as consumers can spend less on gasoline and more on shopping and services. But for the American energy sector the future looks less bright. It’s effecting places like Alaska, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas, the New York Times reports. US oil experts recall the 1980s oil price downturn, accompanied by economic disasters around the globe and arguably becoming one of the causes of the fall of the Soviet Union. Some experts are positive and say America’s oil-producing states won’t suffer too much because they “diversified their economies.”
  • These workers can earn more than $1,700 a week, much higher than the average $848 a week payment for other workers, the WSJ reported. When experienced workers lose their highly paid jobs, they stop paying their bills. There are also fears of a house-price slump. Fitch Ratings has already warned that with the price of oil continuing to plummet, home prices in Texas “may be unsustainable.”
  • Paul Merrell on 29 Dec 14
     
    The oil bubble is beginning to burst. Blowback. 
Paul Merrell

Moon of Alabama - 0 views

www.moonofalabama.org

war & peace Syria U.S.-foreign-policy moderate-rebels military-defeat

shared by Paul Merrell on 03 Aug 15 - Cached
  • Over the last year the U.S. bombed Jabhat al-Nusra personal and facilities in Syria some five or six times. The al-Qaeda subgroup also has a history of attacking U.S. paid "relative moderate" proxy forces in Syria. The Pentagon recently inserted another U.S. mercenary group into north Syria. This was accompanied by a media campaign in which the administration lauded itself for the operation. The newly inserted group is especially trained and equipped to direct U.S. air attacks like those that earlier hit al-Nusra fighters. Now that freshly inserted group was attacked by Jabhat al-Nusra. Some of its members were killed and others were abducted. The Obama administration is shocked, SHOCKED, ABSOLUTELY SHOCKED that Jabhat al-Nusra would do such a ghastly deed. "Why would they do that?" "Who could have known that they would attack U.S. proxy forces???"
  • There is no longer an Jihadist ISIS or ISIL in Syria and Iraq. The people leading that entity declared (pdf) today, at the highly symbolic beginning of Ramadan, themselves to be a new caliphate:
  • Could someone explain to the fucking dimwits in the Pentagon and the Obama administrations that people everywhere, and especially terrorists group, hate it when you bomb them and kill their leaders? That those people you bomb might want to take revenge against you and your proxies? That people you bombed will not like your targeting team moving in next door to them? That alQaeda is not an "ally"? These people are too pathetically clueless to even be embarrassed about it. The accumulated intelligence quotient of the administration and Pentagon officials running the anti-Syria operation must be below three digits. But aside from their lack of basic intelligence the utter lack of simple "street smarts" is the real problem here. These people have no idea how life works outside of their beltway cages.
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  • On more thought from me on why the dimwits did not foresee that Nusra would attack. The White House insisted on calling a part of Nusra the "Khorasan group" and explained that it was only bombing this groups of alQaeda veterans now part of Nusra because the "Khorasan group" planning to hit in "western" countries. No expert nor anyone on the ground in Syria thought that this differentiation was meaningful. Nusra is alQaeda and so are all of its members. But the White House and Pentagon probably thought that Nusra would accept the artificial separation they themselves had made up. That Nusra would understand that it is seen as an "ally" and only the "Khorasan group" is seen as an enemy. If that was the line of thinking, and the situation seems to point to that, then these people have fallen for their own propaganda stunt. They probably believed that the "Khorasan group" was an accepted narrative because they were telling that tale to themselves. Poor idiots.
  • UPDATE: The one sane guy at the Council of Foreign relations, Micah Zenko, foresaw this debacle and wrote on March 2: [The U.S. trained mercenaries] will immediately be an attractive target for attacks by the Islamic State, Assad’s ground and air forces, and perhaps Nusra and other forces. Killing or taking prisoner fighters (or the families of those fighters) who were trained by the U.S. military will offer propaganda value, as well as leverage, to bargain for those prisoners’ release. He compared the whole operation to the 1961 CIA invasion of Cuba: Last September, the White House and Congress agreed to authorize and fund a train-and-equip project similar to the Bay of Pigs, but this time in the Middle East, without any discussion about phase two. The Syrian project resembles 1961 in two ways: What happens when the fighting starts is undecided, and the intended strategic objective is wholly implausible.
  • The attack on Friday was mounted by the Nusra Front, which is affiliated with Al Qaeda. It came a day after the Nusra Front captured two leaders and at least six fighters of Division 30, which supplied the first trainees to graduate from the Pentagon’s anti-Islamic State training program. In Washington, several current and former senior administration officials acknowledged that the attack and the abductions by the Nusra Front took American officials by surprise and amounted to a significant intelligence failure. While American military trainers had gone to great lengths to protect the initial group of trainees from attacks by Islamic State or Syrian Army forces, they did not anticipate an assault from the Nusra Front. In fact, officials said on Friday, they expected the Nusra Front to welcome Division 30 as an ally in its fight against the Islamic State....A senior Defense Department official acknowledged that the threat to the trainees and their Syrian recruiters had been misjudged, and said that officials were trying to understand why the Nusra Front had turned on the trainees. Like other Obama administration operations this one did not fail because of "intelligence failure" but because an utter lack of common sense.
  • U.S. media can no agree with itself if Russia is giving ISIS an airforce or if Russia pounds ISIS with the biggest bomber raid in decades. Such confusion occurs when propaganda fantasies collide with the observable reality. To bridge such divide requires some fudging. So when the U.S. claims to act against the finances of the Islamic State while not doing much, the U.S Public Broadcasting Service has to use footage of Russian airstrikes against the Islamic State while reporting claimed U.S. airstrike successes. The U.S. military recently claimed to have hit Islamic State oil tankers in Syria. This only after Putin embarrassed Obama at the G-20 meeting in Turkey. Putin showed satellite pictures of ridiculous long tanker lines waiting for days and weeks to load oil from the Islamic State without any U.S. interference.
  • The U.S. then claimed to have hit 116 oil tankers while the Russian air force claims to have hit 500. But there is an important difference between these claims. The Russians provided videos showing how their airstrikes hit at least two different very large oil tanker assemblies with hundreds of tankers in each. They also provided video of several hits on oil storage sites and refinery infrastructure. I have found no video of U.S. hits on Islamic State oil tanker assemblies. The U.S. PBS NewsHour did not find any either. In their TV report yesterday about Islamic State financing and the claimed U.S. hits on oil trucks they used the videos Russia provided without revealing the source. You can see the Russian videos played within an interview with a U.S. military spokesperson at 2:22 min.
  • The U.S. military spokesperson speaks on camera about U.S. airforce hits against the Islamic State. The video cuts to footage taken by Russian airplanes hitting oil tanks and then trucks. The voice-over while showing the Russian video with the Russians blowing up trucks says: "For the first time the U.S. is attacking oil delivery trucks." The video then cuts back to the U.S. military spokesperson. At no point is the Russian campaign mentioned or the source of the footage revealed. Any average viewer of the PBS report will assume that the black and white explosions of oil trucks and tanks are from of U.S. airstrikes filmed by U.S. air force planes. The U.S. military itself admitted that its strikes on IS oil infrastructure over the last year were "minimally effective". One wonders then how effective the claimed strike against 116 trucks really was. But unless we have U.S. video of such strikes and not copies of Russian strike video fraudulently passed off as U.S. strikes we will not know if those strikes happened at all.
  • The wannabe Sultan Erdogan did not get his will in Syria where he had planned to capture and annex Aleppo. The Russians prevented that. He now goes for his secondary target, Mosul in Iraq, which many Turks see as historic part of their country
  • Mosul, Iraq's second biggest city with about a million inhabitants, is currently occupied by the Islamic State. On Friday a column of some 1,200 Turkish soldiers with some 20 tanks and heavy artillery moved into a camp near Mosul. The camp was one of four small training areas where Turkey was training Kurds and some Sunni-Arab Iraqis to fight the Islamic State. The small camps in the northern Kurdish area have been there since the 1990s. They were first established to fight the PKK. Later their Turkish presence was justified as ceasefire monitors after an agreement ended the inner Kurdish war between the KDP forces loyal to the Barzani clan and the PUK forces of the Talabani clan. The bases were actually used to monitor movement of the PKK forces which fight for Kurdish independence in Turkey. The base near Mosul is new and it was claimed to be just a small weapons training base. But tanks and artillery have a very different quality than some basic AK-47 training. Turkey says it will increase the numbers in these camps to over 2000 soldiers.
  • Should Mosul be cleared of the Islamic State the Turkish heavy weapons will make it possible for Turkey to claim the city unless the Iraqi government will use all its power to fight that claim. Should the city stay in the hands of the Islamic State Turkey will make a deal with it and act as its protector. It will benefit from the oil around Mosul which will be transferred through north Iraq to Turkey and from there sold on the world markets. In short: This is an effort to seize Iraq's northern oil fields. That is the plan but it is a risky one. Turkey did not ask for permission to invade Iraq and did not inform the Iraqi government. The Turks claim that they were invited by the Kurds: Turkey will have a permanent military base in the Bashiqa region of Mosul as the Turkish forces in the region training the Peshmerga forces have been reinforced, Hürriyet reported. The deal regarding the base was signed between Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) President Massoud Barzani and Turkish Foreign Minister Feridun Sinirlioğlu, during the latter’s visit to northern Iraq on Nov. 4. There are two problems with this. First: Massoud Barzani is no longer president of the KRG. His mandate ran out and the parliament refused to prolong it. Second: Mosul and its Bashiqa area are not part of the KRG. Barzani making a deal about it is like him making a deal about Paris.
  • The Iraqi government and all major Iraqi parties see the Turkish invasion as a hostile act against their country. Abadi demanded the immediate withdrawal of the Turkish forces but it is unlikely that Turkey will act on that. Some Iraqi politicians have called for the immediate dispatch of the Iraqi air force to bomb the Turks near Mosul. That would probably the best solution right now but the U.S. installed Premier Abadi is too timid to go for such strikes. The thinking in Baghdad is that Turkey can be kicked out after the Islamic State is defeated. But this thinking gives Turkey only more reason to keep the Islamic State alive and use it for its own purpose. The cancer should be routed now as it is still small. Barzani's Kurdistan is so broke that is has even confiscated foreign bank accounts to pay some bills. That may be the reason why Barzani agreed to the deal now. But the roots run deeper. Barzani is illegally selling oil that belongs to the Iraqi government to Turkey. The Barzani family occupies  not only the presidential office in the KRG but also the prime minister position and the local secret services. It is running the oil business and gets a big share of everything else. On the Turkish side the oil deal is handled within the family of President Erdogan. His son in law, now energy minister, had the exclusive right to transport the Kurdish oil through Turkey. Erdogan's son controls the shipping company that transports the oil over sea to the customer, most often Israel. The oil under the control of the Islamic State in Iraq passes the exactly same route. These are businesses that generate hundreds of millions per year.
  • It is unlikely that U.S., if it is not behinds Turkey new escapade, will do anything about it. The best Iraq could do now is to ask the Russians for their active military support. The Turks insisted on their sovereignty when they ambushed a Russian jet that brushed its border but had no intend of harming Turkey. Iraq should likewise insist on its sovereignty, ask Russia for help and immediately kick the Turks out. The longer it waits the bigger the risk that Turkey will eventually own Mosul.
  • Another fake news item currently circling is that Trump has given order to the military to create safe zones for Syria. The reality is still far from it: [H]is administration crafted a draft order that would direct the Pentagon and the State Department to submit plans for the safe zones within 90 days. The order hasn't yet been issued. The draft of the order, which will be endlessly revised, says that safe zones could be in Syria or in neighboring countries. The Pentagon has always argued against such zones in Syria and the plans it will submit, should such an order be issued at all, will reflect that. The safe zones in Syria ain't gonna happen
  • Paul Merrell on 03 Aug 15
     
    So the first group of U.S. trained "moderate" Syrian opposition fighters are an epic fail. Who'd of thunk? 
Paul Merrell

ISIL Oil Smugglers Play Hide and Seek with Russian Bombers En Route to Turkey - nsnbc i... - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...ian-bombers-en-route-to-turkey

war & peace Syria Iraq Turkey oil-smuggling Russia

shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Terrorists in Syria, primarily ISIL are changing smuggling routes for oil from Syria to Turkey in an attempt to avoid Russian bombs. The Russian air forces in Syria have destroyed over 2,000 tanker trucks used for smuggling oil since Russia launched its air campaign in Syria. 
  • The Chief of Staff of the Russian General Staff Main Operations Department Sergei Rudskoy said on Friday that terrorist linked smugglers are changing logistics and laying new routes for crude oil smuggling to avoid Russian air strikes. The smuggling route is running from Syria’s oil-rich Deir Ez-Zor, controlled by the self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS / ISIL Daesh) through the border settlements of Guna and Tell-Sfuk in Syria towards the communities of Mosul and Zaho in Iraq, he added. Convoys of tanker trucks reportedly follow the shortest route towards the Syrian-Iraqi border, which they cross in the area of the settlement of Tell-Sfuk. Rudskoy stressed that Turkey remains the final destination point of oil smuggling adding that oil is smuggled into Turkey through the checkpoint in the area of Zaho. Russian reconnaissance reportedly detects almost 12,000 fuel tanker trucks on the Turkey-Iraq border, especially in the area of the settlement of Zaho on the Turkey-Iraq border. The Zaho area is part of the eastern route used by the Islamic State terrorist organization for illegal oil trade, added Rudoski. The Chief od Staff of the Russian General Staff Main Operations Department noted:
  • “As of the moment of surveillance in the Zaho area, there were 11,775 fuel tanker trucks on both sides of the Turkish-Iraqi border. As many as 4,530 of them were on the territory of Turkey and 7,245 in Iraq.” Rudskoi presented enlarged photos of the area by grids, noting that specifically, there are 3,850 fuel tanker and large-duty trucks in Grid A on the Turkish side, with 200 of them moving towards the Iraqi border and the rest amassed in parking areas. Russia’s reconnaissance has also spotted 980 fuel tanker trucks in Iraq and 680 in Turkey in Gird B in close vicinity to the border, Rudskoi said. About another 4,900 fuel tanker trucks are amassed in Grid B and about 1,350 in Grid D, the chief of the Russian General Staff Main Operations Department said, adding that: “It is necessary to note that this checkpoint is used to transport oil extracted both in Iraq and Syria,” he added. Oil tank trucks continue moving from Syria to Turkey According to the official, heavy-load vehicles continue to move from Syrian territory to Turkey. “Oil tank trucks continue crossing the Syrian-Turkish border,”
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  • Rudskoy stressed that Russian air forces continued giving priority to undermining the sources of terrorists’ revenues in Syria, noting that: “We carefully analyzed foreign media reports, comments of experts and officials that appeared after the Russian Defense Ministry made public information on the routes of smuggling the oil illegally produced by ISIS This information on where and how oil is smuggled from the areas controlled by militants did not become a revelation for many. The photo and video footage that we provided just confirmed the existing guesses and versions about who covers up the sources of terrorists’ criminal revenues.” The Turkish government vehemently denies that it facilitates the oil smuggling despite a growing body of evidence to the contrary. It is noteworthy that some of the stolen and smuggled oil from Syria has ended up in European countries including Norway. Chemical analysis of oil has proven that the oil, coming from Turkey, is stolen Syrian oil. On April 22, 2013, the EU lifted its ban on the import of Syrian oil from what it designated as “rebel-held territories”.
  • Paul Merrell on 25 Dec 15
     
    "As of the moment of surveillance in the Zaho area, there were 11,775 fuel tanker trucks on both sides of the Turkish-Iraqi border. As many as 4,530 of them were on the territory of Turkey and 7,245 in Iraq." So why isn't the U.S. taking out the tankers on the Iraqi side of the border? 
Paul Merrell

OPEC heading for no output cut despite oil price plunge | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...-meeting-idUSKCN0JA0O320141126

oil-prices OPEC over-supply shale-oil

shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • OPEC Gulf oil producers will not propose an output cut on Thursday, reducing the likelihood of joint action by OPEC to prop up prices that have sunk by a third since June. "The GCC reached a consensus," Saudi Arabian Oil MinisterAli al-Naimi told reporters, referring to the Gulf Cooperation Council which includes Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. "We are very confident that OPEC will have a unified position.""The power of convincing will prevail tomorrow ... I am confident that OPEC is capable of taking a very unified position," Naimi added.
  • A Gulf OPEC delegate told Reuters the GCC had reached a consensus not to cut oil output. Three OPEC delegates separately told Reuters they believed OPEC was unlikely to take any action when the 12-member organisation meets on Thursday after Russia said it would not cut output in tandem.The OPEC meeting will be one of its most crucial in recent years, with oil having tumbled to below $78 a barrel due to the U.S. shale boom and slower economic growth in China and Europe.Cutting output unilaterally would effectively mean for OPEC, which accounts for a third of global oil output, a further loss of market share to North American shale oil producers.
  • If OPEC decided against cutting and rolled over existing output levels on Thursday, that would effectively mean a price war that the Saudis and other Gulf producers could withstand due to their large foreign-exchange reserves. Other members, such as Venezuela or Iran, would find it much more difficult.
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  • Among the members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, Venezuela and Iraq have called for output cuts. OPEC's traditional price hawk Iran said on Wednesday its views were now close to those of Saudi Arabia.
  • "The onslaught of North American shale oil has drastically undermined OPEC’s position and reduced its market share," said Dr. Gary Ross, chief executive of PIRA Energy Group. Russia, which produces 10.5 million barrels per day (bpd) or 11 percent of global oil, came to Tuesday's meeting amid hints it might agree to cut output as it suffers from oil's price fall and Western sanctions over Moscow's actions in Ukraine.But as that meeting with Naimi and officials from Venezuela and non-OPEC member Mexico ended, Russia's most influential oil official, state firm Rosneft's (ROSN.MM) head Igor Sechin, emerged with a surprise message - Russia will not reduce output even if oil falls to $60 per barrel.
  • Sechin added that he expected low oil prices to do more damage to producing nations with higher costs, in a clear reference to the U.S. shale boom. On Wednesday, Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak said he expected the country's output to be flat next year. Many at OPEC were surprised by Sechin's suggestion that Russia - in desperate need of oil prices above $100 per barrel to balance its budget - was ready for a price war.
  • OPEC publications have shown that global supply will exceed demand by more than 1 million bpd in the first half of next year.While the statistics speak in favour of a cut, the build-up to the OPEC meeting has seen one of the most heated debates in years about the next policy step for the group."The idea of unleashing a price war against U.S. shale oil seems strange to me. I doubt you can win this battle as most U.S. oil producers are hedging a lot of their output," said a top oil executive visiting Vienna for talks with OPEC ministers.
Paul Merrell

Obama's "War on Ebola" or War for Oil? Sending 3000 Troops to African "Ebola" Areas tha... - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5406142

war & peace Ebola big oil west-Africa Obama boots-on-the-ground

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • For a Nobel Peace Prize President, Barack Obama seems destined to go down in history books as the President who presided over one of the most aggressive series of wars ever waged by a bellicose Washington Administration. Not even George Bush and Dick Cheney came close.
  • Now Obama’s advisers, no doubt led by the blood-thirsty National Security Adviser, Susan Rice, have come up with a new war. This is the War Against Ebola. On September 16, President Obama solemnly declared the war. He announced, to the surprise of most sane citizens, that he had ordered 3,000 American troops, the so-called “boots on the ground” that the Pentagon refuses to agree to in Syria, to wage a war against….a virus? In a carefully stage-managed appearance at the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Obama read a bone-chilling speech. He called the alleged Ebola outbreaks in west Africa, “a global threat, and it demands a truly global response. This is an epidemic that is not just a threat to regional security. It’s a potential threat to global security, if these countries break down, if their economies break down, if people panic,” Obama continued, conjuring images that would have made Andromeda Strain novelist Michael Chrichton drool with envy. Obama added, “That has profound effects on all of us, even if we are not directly contracting the disease. This outbreak is already spiraling out of control.”
  • With that hair-raising introduction, the President of the world’s greatest Superpower announced his response. In his role as Commander-in-Chief of the United States of America announced he has ordered 3,000 US troops to west Africa in what he called, “the largest international response in the history of the CDC.” He didn’t make clear if their job would be to shoot the virus wherever it reared its ugly head, or to shoot any poor hapless African suspected of having Ebola. Little does it matter that the US military doesn’t have anywhere near 3,000 troops with the slightest training in public health. Before we all panic and line up to receive the millions of doses of untested and reportedly highly dangerous “Ebola vaccines” the major drug-makers are preparing to dump on the market, some peculiarities of this Ebola outbreak in Africa are worth noting.
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  • A major problem for Chan and her backers, however, is that her Ebola statistics are very, very dubious. For those whose memory is short, this is the same Dr Margaret Chan at WHO in Geneva who was guilty in 2009 of trying to panic the world into taking unproven vaccines for “Swine Flu” influenza, by declaring a Global Pandemic with statistics calling every case of symptoms that of the common cold to be “Swine Flu,” whether it was runny nose, coughing, sneezing, sore throat. That changed WHO definition of Swine Flu allowed the statistics of the disease to be declared Pandemic. It was an utter fraud, a criminal fraud Chan carried out, wittingly or unwittingly (she could be simply stupid but evidence suggests otherwise), on behalf of the major US and EU pharmaceutical cartel. In a recent Washington Post article it was admitted that sixty-nine percent of all the Ebola cases in Liberia registered by WHO have not been laboratory confirmed through blood tests. Liberia is the epicenter of the Ebola alarm in west Africa. More than half of the alleged Ebola deaths, 1,224, and nearly half of all cases, 2,046, have been in Liberia says WHO. And the US FDA diagnostic test used for the lab confirmation of Ebola is so flawed that the FDA has prohibited anyone from claiming they are safe or effective. That means, a significant proportion of the remaining 31 % of the Ebola cases lab confirmed through blood tests could be false cases.
  • Then the official WHO Ebola Fact Sheet dated September, 2014, states, “It can be difficult to distinguish EVD from other infectious diseases such as malaria, typhoid fever and meningitis.” Excuse me, Dr Margaret Chan, can you say that slowly? It can be difficult to distinguish EVD from other infectious diseases such as malaria, typhoid fever and meningitis? And you admit that 69% of the declared cases have never been adequately tested? And you state that the Ebola symptoms include “sudden onset of fever fatigue, muscle pain, headache and sore throat. This is followed by vomiting, diarrhea, rash, symptoms of impaired kidney and liver function, and in some cases, both internal and external bleeding”? In short it is all the most vague and unsubstantiated basis that lies behind President Obama’s new War on Ebola.
  • One striking aspect of this new concern of the US President for the situation in Liberia and other west African states where alleged surges of Ebola are being claimed is the presence of oil, huge volumes of untapped oil. The offshore coast of Liberia and east African ‘Ebola zones’ conveniently map with the presence of vast untapped oil and gas resources shown here The issue of oil in west Africa, notably in the waters of the Gulf of Guinea have become increasingly strategic both to China who is roaming the world in search of future secure oil import sources, and the United States, whose oil geo-politics was summed up in a quip by then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the 1970’s: ‘If you control the oil, you control entire nations.’
  • The Obama Administration and Pentagon policy has continued that of George W. Bush who in 2008 created the US military Africa Command or AFRICOM, to battle the rapidly-growing Chinese economic presence in Africa’s potential oil-rich countries. West Africa is a rapidly-emerging oil treasure, barely tapped to date. A US Department of Energy study projected that African oil production would rise 91 percent between 2002 and 2025, much from the region of the present Ebola alarm. Chinese oil companies are all over Africa and increasingly active in west Africa, especially Angola, Sudan and Guinea, the later in the epicenter of Obama’s new War on Ebola troop deployment.
  • If the US President were genuine about his concern to contain a public health emergency, he could look at the example of that US-declared pariah Caribbean nation, Cuba. Reuters reports that the Cuban government, a small financially distressed, economically sanctioned island nation of 11 million people, with a national budget of $50 billion, Gross Domestic Product of 121 billion and per capita GDP of just over $10,000, is dispatching 165 medical personnel to Africa to regions where there are Ebola outbreaks. Washington sends 3,000 combat troops. Something smells very rotten around the entire Ebola scare.
  • F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”
Gary Edwards

Interview with Harold Hamm: How North Dakota Became Saudi Arabia - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...4226204576602524023932438.html

Harold-Hamm Oil-Natural-Gas Energy Obammunism Jackboot-Obammunism watermelons

shared by Gary Edwards on 01 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 01 Oct 11
     
    A USA Oil and Natural Gas revolution - WSBJ Stephen Moore interview Harold Hamm of Continental Resources.  Hamm recounts his discussion with the watermelon in chief, Obama. (Green on the outside and red on the inside).  Seems Obama really believes his green energy will totally replace oil and natural gas within the next five years.  What an idiot. excerpt: Harold Hamm, the Oklahoma-based founder and CEO of Continental Resources, the 14th-largest oil company in America, is a man who thinks big. He came to Washington last month to spread a needed message of economic optimism: With the right set of national energy policies, the United States could be "completely energy independent by the end of the decade. We can be the Saudi Arabia of oil and natural gas in the 21st century." "President Obama is riding the wrong horse on energy," he adds. We can't come anywhere near the scale of energy production to achieve energy independence by pouring tax dollars into "green energy" sources like wind and solar, he argues. It has to come from oil and gas. You'd expect an oilman to make the "drill, baby, drill" pitch. But since 2005 America truly has been in the midst of a revolution in oil and natural gas, which is the nation's fastest-growing manufacturing sector. No one is more responsible for that resurgence than Mr. Hamm. He was the original discoverer of the gigantic and prolific Bakken oil fields of Montana and North Dakota that have already helped move the U.S. into third place among world oil producers. How much oil does Bakken have? The official estimate of the U.S. Geological Survey a few years ago was between four and five billion barrels. Mr. Hamm disagrees: "No way. We estimate that the entire field, fully developed, in Bakken is 24 billion barrels."
Paul Merrell

Map, images from Russian military show main routes of ISIS oil smuggling to Turkey - RT... - 0 views

www.rt.com/...324303-isis-oil-routes-turkey

war & peace Turkey ISIL oil-smuggling Russia

shared by Paul Merrell on 04 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Russia’s Defense Ministry published images and a map it says reveal a chain of oil smuggling to Turkey from Islamic State – from extraction to refining facilities. At least three ISIS oil supply routes were located, all leading to Turkey.
  • “The General Staff of the Russian Federation Armed Forces has irrefutable evidence of Turkey’s involvement based on aerial and space reconnaissance data,” Lieutenant-General Sergey Rudskoy said during the Defense Ministry briefing on Wednesday.
  • According to Rudskoy, Russia has identified “three main oil transportation routes from ISIS-controlled Syrian and Iraqi territories into Turkey.”“The western route leads to the Mediterranean ports, the northern route leads to the Batman oil refinery on the Turkish territory and the eastern one leads to a large transfer base in Cizre [Turkey].”The documents published by the ministry show “the entire chain of oil supply into Turkey - from extraction to refining facilities.”
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  • “In total, in their illegal oil smuggling business, terrorists are using at least 8,500 trucks to transport up to 200,000 barrels of oil every day.”He added that the vehicles with illegal oil that are crossing Turkey are not checked at the border.“The presented photos, which were taken this August, demonstrate hundreds of oil trucks and heavy vehicles moving both to and from the Turkish border.”Rudskoy concluded that most of the oil is being transferred from eastern Syria to a large oil refinery plant in Batman, 100km from the Syrian border.The 200,000 barrels of oil that Russia says is smuggled by IS every day is roughly equivalent to the average daily oil export of Gabon in 2014 or Australia in 2013, according to an OPEC annual statistical bulletin.It is also only slightly less than the average daily oil export of pre-war Syria in the second half of the 2000s, which amounted to 247,000-250,000 barrels per day. 
  • Paul Merrell on 04 Dec 15
     
    I wonder why the U.S. military never bombed the ISIL supply lines into Turkey for 14 months, until Putin embarrassed Obama into doing it --- once. 
Paul Merrell

Moscow dips Erdogan's Nose in ISIS Oil - nsnbc international | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...dips-erdogans-nose-in-isis-oil

war & peace Syia Iraq ISIL Russia Turkey oil-smuggling Erdogan

shared by Paul Merrell on 04 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • The Russian Ministry of Defense held a press conference, presenting satellite images documenting the smuggling of Syrian oil by Daesh via Turkey. The Defense Ministry stressed that a terrorist organization without funds is like a predator without teeth. Russian President Vladimir Putin reiterated that part of the Turkish leadership is trading with terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq. 
  • On Wednesday the Russian Defense Ministry held a press conference, briefing the press on oil smuggling operations by the self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS / ISIL / Daesh) as well as other Islamist terrorist organizations from Syria and Iraq via Turkey. Deputy Defense Minister Anatoly Antonov, stressed that Russia is aware of three main oil smuggling routes to Turkey. Antonov noted that the Ministry would only be presenting some of the facts that confirm that “a whole team of bandits and Turkish elites are stealing oil from their neighbors”, operating in the region. Antonov stressed that smuggling operations have such proportions that they constitute a de facto pipeline – on wheels – consisting of thousands of trucks. The Defense Ministry released images from Russian air strikes against smuggling operations. Besides that, the Ministry presented satellite images that show how thousands of trucks, including oil tankers are crossing the border between Syria and Turkey, unimpeded and uncontrolled. The flow of oil is in part refined in Syria or northern Iraq, while much is transported to refineries in Turkey. While part of the product is used for the domestic market, much of the oil is exported via Turkish parts such as Iskenderun, as shown in Satellite images.
  • Russian Air Forces have, over the past two months struck 32 oil complexes, 11 refineries, 23 oil pumping stations, said Lieutenant-General Sergey Rudskoy . Rudskoy stressed that the air strikes have cut the smuggling operations which are estimated at a value between 1.4 and 3 million dollar US per day by about 50 percent. The Chief of the National Center for State Defense Control Lt.Gen. Mikhail Mizintsev said that the Defense Ministry is aware of that up to 2,000 fighters, 120 tons of ammunition and 250 vehicles have been delivered to Islamic State and Al-Nusrah militants from Turkish territory recently. Such operations have, however, been ongoing for a long time. Turkish President R. Tayyip Erdogan responded to the Russian Defense Ministry dipping his nose in ISIS oil, claiming that it was purely slander. Speaking in the Qatari capital Doha, Erdogan attempted to distract from the presented satellite data by accusing Russia of doing business with Daesh. Pentagon spokesman Steve Warren responded by saying that Washington flatly denies that the Turks are somehow working with ISIL. Warren denounced these “allegations” based in satellite images as “preposterous“.
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  • It is noteworthy that the European Union, on April 22, 2013, lifted its ban on the import of Syrian oil, provided that it comes from “rebel-held territories”. Prominent Turks, including the former Chief of Military Intelligence Hakki Pekin and members of Turkey’s progressive opposition have for years stressed that they have evidence that networks around Erdogan and the AKP leadership are smuggling both stolen Syrian oil as well as Iraqi oil from the predominantly Kurdish northern Iraq via Turkey. It is also noteworthy that nsnbc has been presented evidence that shows that R. Tayyip Erdogan, former Lebanese PM Saad Hariri and others, including US citizens were present when the final decision to “invade Iraq with ISIS” was made on the sidelines of the Atlantic Council’s Energy Summit in Turkey, in November 2013. Speaking at his annual address, Russian President Vladimir Putin lashed out at part of Turkey’s leadership over its business with and support of terrorist organizations while he promised additional sanctions against Turkey. Commenting on both the State sponsorship of terrorism and the downing of a Russian Su-24 front-line bomber by a Turkish F-16, Putin noted: “We were prepared to cooperate with Turkey on most sensitive issues and go further than their allies. Allah knows why they did it. Apparently Allah decided to punish the ruling clique in Turkey by taking their sanity,”
  • Paul Merrell on 04 Dec 15
     
    All blacked out in American mainstream media, of course. 
Paul Merrell

White House Sends Ankara Two Warning Shots Over Daesh Oil Smuggling - 0 views

sputniknews.com/...-turkey-warning-daesh-oil.html

war & peace Turkey ISIL oil-smuggling U.S. acknowledgment

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Two senior US officials have conceded to Turkey's role in the Daesh oil trade, having previously supported Ankara's denials that it enables the terrorist group to profit by selling stolen Syrian oil. On Wednesday US State Department spokesman John Kirby admitted that Turkey was allowing Daesh to transport contraband oil across its border, and said the US government wanted Turkey to close its border with Syria. Kirby referred to a "98-kilometer stretch" of the Turkish-Syrian border, "which still needs to be closed off because it provides avenues of sustenance for ISIL," allowing oil, fighters and other supplies to pass between the two countries. "We’re working with the Turks to see what we can do to help close that 98-kilometers stretch off," said Kirby, adding that "the Turkish government realizes the importance of this stretch of ground as well, and we’re working hard with them to see what we can do to close it off."
  • However, quick to deflect attention from Ankara's links with Daesh, Kirby added that "it’s not just about oil. It’s about all the ways that ISIL can sustain itself inside Syria."
  • On Thursday US Treasury official Adam Szubin admitted that Daesh oil is smuggled into Turkey, along with the illogical conclusion that "ISIL is selling a great deal of oil to the Assad regime," and claimed that despite being enemies, the two are "still engaged in millions and millions of dollars of trade." Szubin alleged that more oil is sold to the Syrian government that to Turkey. "Some is coming across the border into Turkey," admitted Szubin. The official said that each month, the terrorists make as much as $40 million selling oil, and have earned more than $500 million from the oil trade so far. The official was unable, however, to come up with any evidence to back up his claim that Assad's government is buying oil from Daesh.  The claim was first put forward by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan last month, in order to deflect attention from the evidence Russia had produced to prove that the Turkish government is buying oil from Daesh.
Paul Merrell

Shell stops Arctic activity after 'disappointing' tests - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...business-34377434

environment climate change arctic-drilling Shell

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Royal Dutch Shell has stopped Arctic oil and gas exploration off the coast of Alaska after "disappointing" results from a key well in the Chukchi Sea.In a surprise announcement, the company said it would end exploration off Alaska "for the foreseeable future".Shell said it did not find sufficient amounts of oil and gas in the Burger J well to warrant further exploration.The company has spent about $7bn (£4.5bn) on Arctic offshore development in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas."Shell continues to see important exploration potential in the basin, and the area is likely to ultimately be of strategic importance to Alaska and the US," said Marvin Odum, president of Shell USA. "However, this is a clearly disappointing exploration outcome for this part of the basin."
  • Indeed some analysts suggested Shell might give up on the Arctic completely. "It is possible that Shell might almost be relieved as they can stop exploration for a legitimate operational reason, rather than being seen to bow to environmental pressure," Stuart Elliott from energy information group Platts told the BBC."With the oil price around $50 a barrel, it was a risky endeavour with no guarantee of success. "You could argue that this has been bad for Shell's reputation and it wouldn't be a big surprise if they abandoned Arctic drilling altogether."
  • So, what changed?Certainly, the first findings from the Burger J exploration well 150 miles off the Alaskan coast were not promising.Second, although President Barack Obama had given the necessary permissions for drilling to start again following the problems of rig fires in 2012, Mrs Clinton's tweet revealed that political risks were still substantial.
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  • The US Geological Survey estimates that the Arctic holds about 30% of the world's undiscovered natural gas, as well as 13% of its oil.According to Shell, this amounts to around 400 billion barrels of oil equivalent, 10 times the total oil and gas produced in the North Sea to date.
  • However, environmental groups oppose Arctic offshore drilling, saying it will pollute and damage a natural wilderness largely untouched by human activity. They also argue that fossil fuels such as oil and gas must be left in the ground if the world is to avoid dangerous climate change.Over the summer, protesters in kayaks unsuccessfully tried to block Arctic-bound Shell vessels in Seattle and Portland, Oregon. "Big oil has sustained an unmitigated defeat," said Greenpeace UK executive director John Sauven."The Save the Arctic movement has exacted a huge reputational price from Shell for its Arctic drilling programme, and as the company went another year without striking oil, that price finally became too high."Shell had continued to explore for oil despite the slump in the price of oil. Other oil and gas majors have shelved expensive exploration projects but, having invested billions of dollars in its Arctic project, Shell persisted, believing that Arctic oil would be competitive in the longer term.This is why the announcement came as such a surprise.
  • More on this story Video Shell calls end to Alaska oil search 52 minutes ago Shell has made a costly call to abandon Alaska 28 September 2015 'Volatile' oil price hard to predict, says Shell boss 17 September 2015 Why mega-merger is so important for Shell 8 April 2015 BP profits fall on low oil price 28 July 2015
  • Paul Merrell on 28 Sep 15
     
    Not mentioned in the article, but environmental groups recently announced that they would begin a consumer boycott of Shell fuels because of its Artic drilling.  
Paul Merrell

Yellowstone Oil Spills Expose Threat to Pipelines Under Rivers Nationwide | Inside Clim... - 0 views

insideclimatenews.org/...elines-under-rivers-nationwide

environment pipeline-river-crossings pipelinestan

shared by Paul Merrell on 22 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • At the time the Poplar pipeline ruptured, about 110 feet of it was completely uncovered along the bottom of the Yellowstone River, exposing it to damage.
  • Bridger Pipeline LLC was so sure its Poplar oil line was safely buried below the Yellowstone River that it planned to wait five years to recheck it. But last month, 3.5 years later, the Poplar wasn't eight feet under the river anymore. It was substantially exposed on the river bottom—and leaking more than 30,000 gallons of oil upstream from Glendive, Montana. An ExxonMobil pipeline wasn't buried deeply enough for the Yellowstone River, either. High floodwaters in 2011 uncovered the Silvertip pipe, leaving it defenseless against the fast-moving current and traveling debris. It broke apart in July, and sent 63,000 gallons of oil into the river near Laurel, Montana.
  • Both companies underestimated the river's power and its penchant for scouring away the earth that's covering and protecting their pipelines. That miscalculation led to the Exxon Silvertip spill and it's likely to be declared a significant factor, at a minimum, in the Poplar spill. Such misjudgments have potentially troubling implications nationwide, since pipelines carrying crude oil and petroleum products pass beneath rivers and other bodies of water in more than 18,000 places across America. Many of them are buried only a few feet below the water. "There were a lot of people who wanted to think that the last pipeline spill in the Yellowstone River in 2011 was a freak accident that would never happen again. After this most recent spill, no one believes that anymore," said Scott Bosse, Northern Rockies director for American Rivers. "The truth is, there are probably hundreds of pipelines across the country that are at considerable risk of rupturing under our rivers."
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  • While corrosion is the No. 1 cause of pipeline spills, a sizable number of pipelines at water crossings have ruptured or been endangered by river scour. Among them: ► The Poplar (Jan. 2015) and Silvertip (July 2011) pipeline failures on the Yellowstone River. ► More than 20 pipeline river crossings in Montana were found to be "dangerously close to exposure" during inspections of nearly 90 pipeline crossings in 2011, according to one report. Many of them have since been reburied significantly deeper. The Poplar pipeline was not among the crossings tagged as being close to exposure. ► Nearly half of the 55 oil and gas pipelines that cross the Missouri River were found to have sections buried 10 feet or less below the riverbed, according to the Wall Street Journal. A study by the U.S. Geological Survey, meanwhile, found that the Missouri riverbed had deepened by nine to 41 feet in 27 places because of severe scouring during the 2011 floods. ► An Enterprise Products Partners LLP pipeline that was uncovered by river scouring and ruptured in August 2011. The line spilled more than 28,350 gallons of a gasoline additive into the Missouri River in Iowa. ► A June 2012 spill in Alberta, Canada, where an oil pipeline owned by Plains Midstream Canada failed along the Red Deer River and released more than 122,000 gallons of light crude. Investigators concluded that the pipe was uncovered by scour during high flood waters and subjected to vibrations from the river flow that led a weld to fail.
  • Three Enbridge Corp. crude oil pipelines crossing Minnesota's Tamarac River were exposed by floodwater erosion years ago, and were still exposed in mid-2014. None of the pipes had failed at that point, but one was being propped up by steel legs, according to an MPR News account. Federal regulations aren't much help. The only rule that addresses pipe burial at major river crossings requires petroleum pipelines to be laid at least four feet below the riverbed at the time of construction. Once a pipeline's installed, there are no requirements regarding burial depth. There is no rule requiring exposed pipelines to be reburied, though a spill under those conditions would invite regulatory penalties for leaving the line exposed to hazards. What's more, federal rules put the pipeline companies in charge of identifying all threats that could cause a spill in highly populated or environmentally sensitive areas, and the companies get wide latitude in deciding what to do about them, according to Rebecca Craven, program manager at the Pipeline Safety Trust, a nonprofit group that tracks pipeline risks and regulations.
  • Indeed, the required four-foot minimum initial burial depth for pipelines can be completely eliminated by natural erosion over time or by a single flood event. Active free-flowing rivers can carve with enough ferocity to lower their riverbeds by 20 feet or shift the waterway onto an entirely new path, which can add new stresses to the pipeline or put the river over pipe that has less cover or lacks reinforcement or protective cement casings. The hotly debated Keystone XL oil pipeline project would cross nearly 2,000 rivers, streams and reservoirs in Montana, South Dakota and Nebraska, according to one estimate. The route takes the pipe across the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers, where owner TransCanada has pledged to install the pipeline 35 feet below the riverbeds.
  • See Also: Ruptured Yellowstone Oil Pipeline Was Built With Faulty Welding in 1950sIce Hinders Cleanup of Yellowstone Oil Pipeline SpillExxon Overlooked, Masked Safety Threats in Years Before Pegasus Pipeline BurstDilbit in Exxon's Pegasus May Have Contributed to Pipeline's Rupture
  • Paul Merrell on 22 Feb 15
     
    One of the hidden costs of oil dependence. 
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